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Quotes by Novelist
"We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path."
35
"That was supposed to be the whole purpose of the Internet, you know. To share scientific information.''Not a Viagra- and porn-delivery system?"
35
"Did I really want to stay on this road longer, knowing it was only going to end in devastation?"
35
"Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor."
35
"7. 3. 12. 31. 208: Reckless disrespect of the lightless hours will not be tolerated."
35
"There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list."
35
"You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You are not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity."
35
"Some dreams, some poems, some musical phrases, some pictures, wake feelings such as one never had before, new in colour and form-spiritual sensations, as it were, hitherto unproved."
35
"This mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people-because, surely, Wally was nice-would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At. St. Cloud's, criticism was plainer-and harder, if not impossible, to conceal."
35
"Not only then has each man his individual relation to God but each man has his peculiar relation to God."
35
"'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death."
35
"Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them."
35
"No more fear of hunger. A new kind of freedom. But what then ... what? What would my life be like on a daily basis? Most of it has been consumed with the acquisition of food. Take that away and I'm not really sure who I am, what my identity is. The idea scares me some."
35
"The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment."
35
"I thought about the cameras following me in the terminal and pictured my family watching my entrance on TV. I hoped they'd be proud."
35
"I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong."
35
"Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be."
35
"Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you're afraid of them."
35
"Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence."
35
"I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real."
35
"Patch's eyes made a slow assessment of me, sharpening to vivid black. 'I'm going to have a hard time sending you off with Scott in that dress. Just a heads-up: If you come home and the dress looks even slightly tampered with, I will track Scott down, and when I find him, it won't be pretty."
35
"But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years."
35
"There are 6 reasons that a person does anything: Love, faith, greed, boredom, fear... revenge."
35
"Ruth knew very well what the killer thought he had heard: he'd heard the sound of someone trying not to make a sound - that's what he'd heard."
35
"You're mine, Angel. Every last piece of you. I won't let anything change that."
35
"Outside Styx's apartment was not the first time Rochester and I had met, or would it be the last. We first encountered each other at Haworth House in Yorkshire when my mind was young and the barrier between reality and make-believe had not yet hardened into the shell that cocoons us in adult life. The barrier was soft, pliable and, for a moment, thanks to the kindness of a stranger and the power of a good storytelling voice, I made the short journey--and returned."
35
"... your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me..."
35
"His heart was like a sensitive plant, that opens for a moment in the sunshine, but curls up and shrinks into itself at the slightest touch of the finger, or the lightest breath of wind."
35
"Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality."
35
"Sex exists in the now without past or future. If, for a single second, your minds drifts back to the past or forwards into the unknown, the moment withers like a dead plant and the passage of pleasure turns to a road of dust."
35
"The important thing is not what we (look) like,but the role we play in our best friend's life."
35
"Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart."
35
"Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up."
35
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